


This so quite new a thing

by pushdragon



Series: All the world is bullet shaped [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 04:11:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3235793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur cements his place in Eames's criminal family. Eames gets the measure of things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This so quite new a thing

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Rzecz zupełnie nowa](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3881023) by [Donnie_Engelvin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donnie_Engelvin/pseuds/Donnie_Engelvin)



The courier job he takes on to repay Jules for the loan of his house is a piece of piss. The clients are a bunch of curious post-graduates who don't have the first idea about dealing with the serious end of the drug trade. They don't even bother to sample the vials in Eames's luggage before they pay him. They just glance at each other for reassurance and count out the cash in fresh fifty pound notes, as if Eames might go to the police if the tally came up short. As if the formality of the count would make the slightest difference if he meant to double-cross them.

But first there had been the delay caused by the security spike of an unexpected ministerial visit, so a two day trip spins out to a week, and he's pretty sick of the company of strangers by the time he jogs down the shallow stairs of Gare Saint Charles and straight into the taxi. 

The Pointe-Rouge house is pretty quiet when he drops his bag inside the door, but in the lounge room he finds Jean-Vincent helping his mother set up a new set of bluetooth speakers that look too sleek to be honestly acquired, and from the lazy, sunlit shelter of the back yard comes the sound of laughter and trade talk.

In the afternoon shade, Frank is doling out the last of a bottle of the half-decent rosé that's still coming in by the crate load from that agricultural subsidy scam he ran in the nineties. With him is Mario, his youngest, Hervé, and a couple of guys from the wrecking yard. Miriam is on the bench seat with her bare foot drawn up, leaning distractedly over a Sotheby's catalogue. And in the last place, half hidden in the shade of the fig tree, is Arthur.

Reclining in a canvas beach chair in a navy college t-shirt, he looks so unlike the dark, tailored spectre from Eames's memory that a delicious first spark of sexual attraction goes through him, as if making an erotic connection with a complete stranger. There's a half-smoked cigarette in the art deco ashtray pointed in his direction. Eames thinks how the clean smell of his hair will be shot through with smoke, later on, a beguiling trace of other men's vice.

"The wanderer returns from his travels," Frank breaks off to observe, switching lazily into English. "All in one piece. Where's my bottle of Glenfiddich Reserve then?"

Eames pats his belly by way of answer, grins, and pulls over the last unvarnished stool to join the group.

Mario picks up the thread of his story, which is the one about the time he nicked a white Renault cabriolet from a seaside carpark outside La Ciotat that turned out to have a black market kidney on ice in the boot. He's up to the bit where he's sent a photo to his sister-in-law for a second opinion on identifying what body part it is.

Arthur asks what kind of Frenchman has never eaten kidney off a plate, and everyone laughs. 

He likes the imperfections in Arthur's French, the occasional piece of yesteryear slang, the slow way he rolls the words in his mouth, as if he's picked up Frank and the boys' leisurely insouciance as well as their accent. He thinks of the warm little shiver he gets when Arthur turns to him sometimes, mid-sentence, relying on him to translate a difficult word. He hopes that hasn't changed. A week felt longer than it should have. 

It's still incongruous to see Arthur at rest, divested of all his high-tech trade tools and the careworn pinch smoothed off his mouth. Right now, he looks like a man on indefinite holiday. The contrast of denim against the blotchy white canvas of the chair emphasises the stretch of his long legs. Eames rests his elbows on his knees and watches a train of ants on a dead fig in the grass. He's a bit itchy in his skin this afternoon, nerves too close to the surface. If he starts dwelling on Arthur's legs, he's going to drive himself mad with frustration. 

"Charlie's back home, did you know?" Miriam says quietly from behind him. "He came by yesterday."

He clamps his gaze on her pendant, a stylised silver cat, and refuses to glance in the direction of his thoughts.

"He's wrapped up in Varna, has he?" 

"The job's on hold. He says it needs a second team. The marks won't move on the deal unless they see a bit of competition."

"Makes sense," Eames says distantly, although he can't help plotting out the persona he could use. Low-level tough guy, flush with half a million from his first dubious real estate deal in Birmingham, dreaming of making a mogul of himself off the easy pickings in Bulgaria. A brash idiot abroad, all bollocks and a grating sense of destiny, just waiting to be taken to the cleaners.

"He asked a lot of questions," Miriam tells him unprompted. "Didn't get many answers though. I think he approved of that."

He goes inside for a glass and another bottle. Charlie's the golden boy of the family, with their mother's chestnut curls and a wide-open smile that draws people to him effortlessly. He's got an easy, intimate charm that makes people love him recklessly. And the secret of his success is that he loves them back, for real, right up until he's wrung their last coin out of them and disappeared into the night. 

He leans in the doorway as Mario winds up his story. 

Charlie's got an unerring eye for a man's vulnerabilities, too. He'll see in a blink what Eames missed for so long, which is that with a quiet, keen persistence, Arthur wants to be part of a team. He’s not the lone wolf that Eames once took him for, noting the irritation with which he corrected the slightest error or shut down any viewpoint he considered less than professionally rigorous. The more he learns of Arthur’s past, piece by hard-won piece, the more he thinks Arthur might have been on a search – through the fucks-ups and betrayals of his time with Cobb, and for years before that – to replace the team he’d lost in college, when the army shut down his research project and stole away the best work of his life.

Charlie knows how to pitch himself to a man’s half-acknowledged desires. And like any cheerfully competitive older sibling, he likes to take things that belong to Eames and make it look accidental. 

He leans in the doorway while Mario winds up his story, which ends up in a hundred thousand Euro windfall (this amount has grown exponentially over the years of re-telling – never mind that the Franc was still official currency when Mario was young and accident-prone) from the drug kingpin whose mother-in-law the dubious organ was destined for. Arthur, the only one for whom this story is new, laughs as he accepts another cigarette from Frank’s depleted pack, and says better to stick to high performance engines, the only care they require is being kept out of the rain.

These slow backyard afternoons can go on forever, and his family has had Arthur all to themselves for a week. But before he has to make an excuse to leave, Mario gets an urgent call from the wrecking yard (dissatisfied customer with a niece who works in law enforcement), and Miriam remembers an online auction about to hit its time limit (a nautilus shaped lamp that’s either a late Tiffany original, or close enough to pass for it in the hands of a persuasive dealer). 

When Eames drags around the stool to put his back to the rest of the group, Arthur leans down to grind out the cigarette in the grass and tosses it towards the ashtray. The gaps in the fig leaves drop little curls of sunlight over his reclining form. The Arthur of his history has always been so much carefully styled image that, when they're apart, he morphs into a besuited shadow in Eames's memory. A frown, a swift-moving gun hand, a prickly, omniscient gaze. These days it seems as if, each time they meet, Eames has to get the measure of him all over again. 

“How did the drop go?” Arthur asks him, abandoning the slightly affected French, sounding like himself again.

He scans the weathered fence posts in the background to distract himself from what the new, softly-spoken tone does to him. “Routine. Just kids looking for something to put an edge on their next party. They’ll be lucky if they get anything more lucid than your average acid trip.”

Arthur’s mouth curls. “On that knock-off machine, it’ll be like wandering around drunk in the world’s biggest Dali painting. Without an experienced architect, they’ll end up stuck in a chasm fighting about paradox theories while they wait for the timer to run down.”

The surreal thing, actually, is sitting here in the Pointe-Rouge backyard, swapping easy trade talk with Arthur, right where Frank and his dad used to come to drink cognac and thrash out the obstacles in their latest job.

He slides his hand onto Arthur’s stomach, a gesture that is shielded by the angle of his back. Through the t-shirt, he feels solid and real. He doesn’t deflect the thoroughly inappropriate contact. In fact, after a few moments, he adds his hand over the top, pinning Eames in place.

“It’s getting late,” Arthur says, loud enough to carry this time. “I need to pick up a new SD card before the stores close.”

Frank has obviously had enough experience of the pointy end of Arthur’s tongue to keep his skepticism to a generalised chuckle.

“Keep it down, old timer,” Eames tells him with a pat on the back as he shoulders his travel bag. “Some of us still engage in the occasional over-the-counter cash transaction. Not everything has to come off a boat on the docks.”

“Thanks for the drink,” Arthur says. “And the advice.”

Frank gives him a weary, wandering salute. Mario clips him on the shoulder as he goes past, pocketing his phone. Eames shepherds him in the door and closes it behind them for good measure.

“Hey!” Miriam calls from a top storey window as they’re stepping back onto the street. “My place, Sunday morning. We’ll see if your moves are as good as you say.”

“All right, Sunday,” Arthur repeats. “And I said I could hold my own on the ice – that’s all.”

“Not how I heard it,” Miriam scoffs as she closes the window. 

**

The flat is tidy, tidier than when he left it. There’s an avocado on the kitchen window sill, next to a green apple. It’s getting dark enough to need the lights turned on. Arthur puts his keys and the paper bag with his new SD card on the formica table. The clatter of the keys sounds homely. Eames puts his own set in the bowl on the countertop.

Out of the fridge that Eames left empty, Arthur takes a plastic container of ready-made salad and a bottle of water. He eats leaning against the counter, fishes out a fork from the drawer by his hip while he talks.

“How did you go getting the vials into England? Any heat?”

There hadn’t been. Jules has breached far more challenging border crossings than the Eurostar before. He’s got a convincing set of perfume bottles that house the somnacin tubes almost invisibly.

“Perfume’s good,” Arthur says, crunching a mouthful of carrot and corn. “Dom used to pass it off as insulin. Dangerous if you happened to get a customs officer with diabetes in the family.”

“Any idiot can get low-volume liquids through customs,” Eames tells him as he pushes open the shutters to let in a bit of breeze. It puts a new kind of edge on the familiar act to do it now, with Arthur in his kitchen, arguing industry hypotheticals like they did through the long mornings back in Kisumu. It’s easy, and that’s not something he expected. 

He’s just beginning the story about how he had to explain away two forgotten rifle cartridges in his hand luggage during an emergency exit from Panama City when Arthur drops his salad container on the counter, and leans in and kisses him. 

He pulls back, just enough to let Eames be the one to close the gap this time, to get a grip around his waist and pull him in. Then he presses himself up against Eames's chest, a sigh in his mouth, like he's been missing this even more than Eames has. Arthur, who usually has his every need itemised and stockpiled, whose mission in life is never to have to ask for anything. Now, with his fingers digging into Eames's upper arm, dragging up and down the muscle, he’s very far from the paragon of self-discipline. His mouth is vinegary from the dressing, fresh tasting. He kisses all-in, like that first time in a Kenyan back-alley, like a lot of times in the weeks between then and now.

Eames shifts one hand down, and thinks what are the chances? He had to work so hard to get here - had to fight every step of the way against their clashing history, and the barriers he’d raised between them, and Arthur's seemingly endless defences - he almost wants to get his totem out to make sure this isn't a fantasy. 

"Tell me what you want," Arthur says urgently, kisses unhesitating over Eames's jaw, adds in hush over his ear. "Tell me how to make you come."

Eames laughs, it bursts out of him a bit sudden and awkward. Because this - he's not quite used to this. He's always liked the kind of woman with the power of seduction, liked to watch her play him, tease and challenge him. There’s an etiquette there he’s understood since he was fifteen. But Arthur hasn't got a seductive bone in his body. If he asks for something, it's for no other reason than that he wants it. He should have got used to it now, the new levels of intimacy Arthur drops them onto, but every time it hits him like an ambush, and he hates to be pushed into anything. 

It’s just another thing, like all the other obstacles, that they have to find creative ways of working around. 

He curls his hand around the back of Arthur's head and leaves it there, thumb stroking softly, until the defensive tension melts off Arthur's dear, sharp face. And then Eames changes the rhythm of where they were at, kisses Arthur light and playful, to ease himself into whatever they’re doing next. Arthur's hands come up to his shoulders, find the place they like to rest, and they go on.

That’s what blew Eames's mind in those three practically sleepless nights in the Alps. That Arthur can be so _easy._

Technically, everything they do is Arthur's call. Eames promised him anything he wanted until the next job, and if Arthur hasn't mentioned when that job might be happening, Eames hasn't pressed the point either. When Arthur wants to be blown, or pounded on all fours, or eaten out until he's panting and wet, he responds to Eames's touch so beautifully that Eames hasn't had the heart to flout their terms. Eames imagines - and he knows from oblique references in late-night bedroom conversations that he's off track with this but he can't help the fantasy - Eames imagines that Arthur had had a long drought before they fell into bed in Kisumu. That Eames had been the first man to touch him for a very long time. It's not true, but he can let himself believe it sometimes, times like this when Arthur is losing control again, practically manhandling his way up Eames’s chest, colliding their hips and shoulders together again and again. 

He goes down on his knees for Arthur, in the end. Presses him up against the cream and maroon 1950s fittings of the cupboard, sinks down, and unbuttons him. 

It's partly selfish, really. What he wants is Arthur's complete attention afterwards. He wants Arthur's hands on him undistracted by his own needs. Even as he lifts Arthur’s waist elastic free of his flatteringly full erection and eases his briefs down, what he wants for himself still hasn’t got to specifics, but he’s greedy tonight. He wants the sort of fucking that shakes them both out of their newly developed habits. He wants the sort of night where the world ends at the bedroom door.

At first he grips Arthur hard around the hips while he sucks him down, squeezing the meat of his arse. Then he gets freer because he's seen enough evidence of how much Arthur like his hands. He rubs up and down Arthur's thighs, baring more of his legs, rubs the delicate backs of his knees, slides his fingers up the insides of his thighs from behind, following the line up to his crease, parting his cheeks and pushing them together, while Arthur starts to pant and gasp.

Somewhere along the line, Arthur has pulled off his t-shirt. When he glances up, Eames indulges in a slow outstroke, eating up all the freshly bared skin with his eyes. While he catches his breath, his attention slides from the needy flush that gathers around Arthur's erection up past the pale contours of his ribs to the inspiring sight of his nipples standing up hard, and his wiry, competent arms hanging there with nothing they can do except grip the counter-top and wait for Eames to finish with him. He drinks in the contrast between the wonky wooden blind behind the kitchen sink and Arthur's narrow chest. 

Arthur touches his mouth, gently careless with three of his fingers resting on Eames's wet bottom lip, and that's more than Eames can bear. He surges to his feet and wraps Arthur in his arms and plunges into a kiss that's nothing but greed. His tongue is hungry in Arthur's mouth, thrusting roughly. It's clear from the groan deep in Arthur's throat how okay he is with this. He bites Arthur's ear, the side of his neck, his shoulder, his neck, and Arthur's breathing has got a bit of a sob in it now. He holds Arthur's right hand against the counter-top and pulls him ruthlessly back into that devouring kiss, and this time he answers the needy thrust of Arthur's body by shoving his hip right where Arthur needs it to be. The sound Arthur makes into his mouth is unbridled need, accompanied by rutting against the rough weave of Eames's jeans. He's out of control, twisting his hips to get maximum pressure as his cock shoves along the inside of Eames's hipbone, rock hard and hot through the denim. Arthur scrunches himself up, sometimes, when he’s right on the edge. Coiled in like a fist looking to throw a punch. He’s jerking painfully rough against Eames’s pocket, face pressed into Eames’s shoulder, and he lets out a solitary, bitten-off groan when he loses it.

The gripping intensity of it fades quickly. Arthur goes still and slumps against him. The unbearable tension of orgasm melts, as if often does with Arthur, into soft, easy laughter. Laughter that's part relief, part endorphin rush, and a bit of amazement at how deeply he's just let himself go. Eames finds it more charming than he lets on. It's the sort of trait that fills him with melancholy, the sort of memory that turns haunting when a lover is long gone. It's an exquisite ache, the knowledge that the sound of Arthur's laugh is going to vanish in a moment, fleeting and lovely and impossible to hold onto.

"What a mess," Arthur says, still smiling, and pushes Eames back far enough to expose the smears of come clinging to his jeans. He unfastens Eames's belt buckle with two efficient tugs. "Let's fix that right up."

Eames stops him with a grip on his wrist that's maybe a touch too firm. 

"No hurry," Eames tells him, despite the bulge in his jeans that proclaims the opposite. He gets down on one knee and distracts himself with the challenge of extracting Arthur from his shoes, socks, jeans and underpants. And then an unexpected yearning for thoroughness makes him turn Arthur's wrist over and pick open the catch on his watch to strip that off him, too. 

Arthur watches him place it on the table with the keys and the paper bag. Then he snatches up his water and saunters in the direction of the bedroom, leaving Eames to watch.

The scotch bottle in the cupboard has got maybe a tumbler full left in it. Eames dumps it, empty, back on the sink. It’s good, that first faint blossoming of inebriation, the temporary, invincible glow.

Arthur is sitting on the end of the bed leaning back on his hands when Eames comes in, still stripping. The moment Eames steps in reach, he gets straight to the point, one hand cupping Eames’s dick while the other meanders down his chest. 

“Blow you?” Arthur asks, his fingers already working him fast and hard. “I thought about this while you were away.”

Before he knows it, he’s got hold of Arthur’s wrist, holding him still. He’s still more sober than he wants to be, and so horny it hurts, and that bitch of a train from Newcastle left at quarter past six this morning. He massages Arthur’s hand. The thought of this has been needling his mind all afternoon, but he can’t find a way to ask for it that doesn’t sound weird or ugly. 

There’s a black tube of lube sitting discreetly behind the table lamp. He picks it up, leaves the condoms in the drawer, the last thing he needs is the complicated hard work of fucking. No. He wants a night that leaves them positively slicked in each other – so filthy it takes half an hour in hot water before they feel fit to leave the house. He wants Arthur deep under his skin, wants to feel that dirty thrill sitting in a bar or a taxi, tomorrow or next week. 

"Okay," Arthur says when he gets it, in that pleased way he has when Eames makes a choice that surprises him. “Get on the bed then.”

He’s already getting his fingers slippery, rubbing them with his thumb to perfect the consistency. As if Eames were a delicate chemical reaction that needed the right expert touch to pull off. Possibly it’s just Arthur’s fingers that do this to him. It’s not a theory he’s had any time to test yet. 

Arthur’s free hand settles over his knee, holds it up and away while his fingers work their way in. It’s excruciating, the smooth intrusion that builds and intensifies, stoking his body’s resistance up to a defensive clench, until the bump of knuckles says that’s all he has to take. Then finally, on the outstroke, he can breathe again. 

“You don’t even know,” Arthur murmurs, “how hot you are like this. I mean, Jesus Eames, look at you.”

Eyes closed, Eames just breathes, feels those two fingers open him up, persisting with slow determination against his body’s unconscious defences. 

It doesn't quite set him off the way it does for Arthur, and he doesn't need it to. Even later, when Arthur really goes to town on him, he won’t get wild on it. But that's okay. He just likes the quiet intrusion of fingers while Arthur strokes him or sucks him off. Even before the first hot slide of his mouth, it makes his heart skitter, the prickly subversiveness of being penetrated, that makes him want to kick and fight. It's good to keep the connection between them when he needs a break from Arthur's mouth. Arthur kisses the inside of his knee, teeth scraping softly against his thigh muscle.

“Look at you,” he repeats, fingers keeping up that miraculous, unflagging rhythm.

Would he get off on this if it was someone else doing it to him? He’d asked himself that question in Newcastle, come up blank. He doesn't need Arthur's hand wedged under his knee to hold him open anymore. His legs have given up any kind of resistance. As Arthur sucks him down, he lets himself fantasise a bit, too, about how it might go if Arthur groaned against his stomach, "I'm going to fuck you now," and pressed the hot length of his cock inside Eames, sinking in and making Eames stretch and tremble around him. The thought of it makes him crazier than the reality did, that one time. It's Arthur's fingers that tear away his inhibitions, Arthur's clever fingers focused on the task of making Eames lose his mind. 

He’s practically milking Eames’s prostate now, and his mouth is pulling tight and sweet. It’s enough to make Eames wrench at the bedclothes as he hits the point of no return, the point where the need to come is so all-consuming he’d beg or murder to get himself there.

Arthur makes a greedy sounding noise around his mouthful, and Eames pretty much blacks out with relief as he comes. 

It’s exactly what he wanted, he thinks as he digs his head down into the pillow, while Arthur slips back into bed beside him. So why is his heart still racing, fighting against the anaesthetic lull of the come-down? Arthur's dropping into sleep beside him, his back warm against Eames’s side. Family tensions are at their lowest ebb, and Freddy's FX job is permanently on ice since his mate on the inside got caught out skimming construction supplies. 

There's something about being with a man. He digs through his assumptions until he teases out what it is. With all his girlfriends, he always had the sense of having the upper hand, by whatever minuscule degree. Sex was given and taken on equal terms, but there was always that invaluable extra quantity of commitment that was a man's right to withhold, the ultimate bargaining chip when everything else had been put on the table. He's enough of a romantic that the advantage would never have occurred to him, until now, when he finds himself wondering how long he has before Arthur's eye starts to rove. It's not as if he wants to settle down. He only wants the security of knowing he could have it if he played his cards right.

He misses having the trump card of a proposal permanently up his sleeve. With Arthur, he only has himself, and Arthur's eye is one of the most critical he has ever known.

He stares at the shadows on the ceiling for a long while before he finally drops off to sleep.

**

The next day he wakes up to rain. Arthur is installed on his sofa, laptop on his knees, researching a new job or maybe working on that compilation of studies on the interaction of sedatives and hallucinogens he says he’s been putting together over the last year. He's got a jumper on, loose trousers with stretch in them, bare feet. There's an air of permanence about the way he fits. 

Sleepy-headed, he leans over the back of the sofa to see how the study is going, but the scent of Arthur's shower gel distracts him, and before he knows it he's leaving two appreciative kisses just under Arthur's jaw. Arthur bends, accommodating, while he tabs out of his work, and that's all the encouragement Eames needs to rub his bristled cheek gently over the newly shaven skin of Arthur's throat. 

“You don’t have any rollerblades,” Arthur observes, explaining the clattering sound that had intruded on the last of Eames’s dreams.

“No,” he replies indignantly. “Not since I was twelve.”

With a noncommittal murmur, Arthur goes back to his screen.

“Faiza can get you some I’ll bet. If you don’t mind a bit of glitter. You weren’t a figure skater were you?” Arthur scratches his bare ankle and gives that a disapproving look.

“Distance,” he says later, when Eames is filling the kettle, picking a teabag out of the new box on the sill. 

“What?”

“Skating. No tricks. No crowd. Just laps of the rink until you think your back is never going to straighten up again.” Eames watches the teabag take on water and sink. “Not a bad sport, if you want to get away from the attitude.” 

When he’s at ease or distracted, Arthur will talk to fill a lull in conversation, a musing sort of soliloquy that lasts until he’s interrupted or diverted, but this isn’t one of those times. 

“You met Charlie,” Eames has to prompt him, leaning over the back of the opposite armchair so he can stretch out that rib injury before it seizes up as he cools down from his shower. 

Arthur glances up at him like the answer was trickier than a simple yes or no.

“I met a lot of people. Your grandmother wanted to teach me to play belote.”

“Did she cheat?”

Arthur opens his mouth and then shuts it again with a frown.

“You wouldn’t even have suspected,” Eames grins. “You should see her clean out a blackjack table, she’s as well-drilled as the bloody Bolshoi. She talks to herself, she fishes around for a handkerchief, gets a king mixed up with a jack. She’s so sweet they send her back to her hotel in a chauffeured car, even after she’s broken the bank. She didn’t take you for much, did she?”

“My passport,” Arthur tells him. “She gave it back though.”

“Alex will be running some checks on you,” he shrugs, but he doesn’t like that. It’s uncomfortable, what it reveals about Grandmother Margot’s opinion of him, of him and Arthur. With family more than anyone, he has to keep this thing quiet. Speaking of which.

“And Charlie?”

“Look,” Arthur says, frowning as he picks up the notepad at his elbow and draws three neat boxes, which quickly fill with details. “Is it a problem that I turned down his job? It’s negotiable if it needs to be.”

Luckily there is brewed cup of tea demanding Eames’s attention. He takes his time with the milk, and uses the scalding sting of the first sip to quell the grin that wants to take over his face.

“Why did you?” he enquires lightly.

“No specific reason.” 

The counter has been wiped clean of stray drops and cup rings by the time he continues. 

“He’s … very charming.” Only Arthur could say that in the same tone he might proclaim someone incompetent or borderline psychopathic. “You never know how deep it goes, with a man like that. Not until you’ve seen him with a gun at his head, or holding a trigger on someone else.”

Eames watches a couple of cars go by in the street below, thinks about all the little coincidences that make up a person’s life.

“I thought I was charming.”

Arthur looks startled at that. Then he smiles, that dimpled smile that used to be reserved for other people. “Did you?”

When he’s put the kitchen back in order, Eames goes to see about the missing door on the hallway closet he's been meaning to hook back up since long before he took off for Macau. He remembers the night it broke off - stumbling back here with the guest DJ from his cousins' club, and a couple of girls who ran a record store by day, and a mate of Charlie's called Monkey who'd helped the family out on some tricky break-and-enters in his skinny late teens. One of those epic nights where the chat never dried up, the DJ's chemical contribution had been exceptionally fine, and friends and strangers had trickled in through the night until the party spilled right down the stairwell and out onto the street.

He’d liked the unrepaired door as a memento of what he loved about his life. He could always count on the unpredictable. He never had to look far for a drink and a good story. If his fingers got itchy, someone always knew someone with a shady venture that needed one of his many skills. He was an Engelvin when he wanted to be part of a first-rate team, and Eames when he needed some space. 

It’s satisfying to hang the door back on its hinges, though. The drill Arthur brought back from Reggie’s data theft job in the Hague is slim-line and gutsy. It charges up like a dream and spins in the eight screws with a high-tech purr. He swings it closed, satisfied.

Back in the lounge room, Arthur has stretched his legs out along the couch, but otherwise hasn’t moved.

"How long can you stay?" Eames asks, picking up a pile of old bills and flicking through them, as if it could take the edge off the question.

"Depends," Arthur says vaguely, frowning at his screen.

"I could clear out some more space in the closet," he hears himself say. "If you want to hang things up."

There's a long silence while Arthur gives most of his attention to his research, barely anything left over for Eames. He tosses the bills into a drawer full of blank Amex cards and napkins.

"Mmm," comes the eventual noncommittal reply. "It's pretty small here." A bit later, he adds, "I've got a job coming up back in the States."

Eames lingers for a bit in case he's going to say that it needs a good forger, or does Eames have plans for the next month. But it turns out he has nothing more to add.

**

There's a break in the weather in the late afternoon. Arthur announces that he's going for a walk and disappears for two hours. When he comes back, hanging his satchel over the back of a kitchen chair, Eames is watching a documentary about a burst dam in the Alps and flicking bad temperedly through an old electronics catalogue he salvaged from the mailbox. He’s in one of those moods where it seems like a large television or set of oversized headphones might help.

Arthur throws his jacket over the free armchair. Underneath, he’s wearing that mushroom coloured t-shirt that hangs on the lean curves of his chest and arms like a silk slip. Eames notices. He notices the bottle of wine that Arthur uncaps and pours from, too. One of those trendy southern Rhone GSM blends that Alex would blanch at – though it made a lively stand-alone glass that afternoon in Jules’s garden.

Arthur puts one of the glasses on the coffee table in front of Eames and gives the documentary about six seconds of his attention.

“Never work with optimistic geotechs,” he says. “If they’re not grumpy and obstructionist, sack them and start again. Can I switch this off?”

“Actually, I was – hey!”

“I can tell you how it ends. Subterranean aquifers. Large volumes of snow-melt slowly weaken the sub-strate. Eventually the whole peak shears off the mountain, into the dam, and the rest is pretty grim. Listen, if you can live in Mombasa, you can live anywhere, right?”

He’s standing beside the television, holding his wine like a lit stick of dynamite. Eames has a feeling that his whole afternoon is about to change.

“Is this about a job?”

Arthur squeezes the stem of his glass even tighter. “No.”

“Then sit down. Sit down and ask me like you’re not already planning out counter-offers.”

Arthur looks at him warily, as if unsure whether Eames’s advice is aid or sabotage. He sits on the couch and sets down his glass. Gradually, the stiff lines of him relax into the cushions.

Eames fucking loves that this is awkward. He’d make Arthur walk over glass for him if he could. Whole mountain ranges of it. It makes his heart light as a balloon, measuring this thing by what Arthur is prepared to do for him.

"You could work out of Paris," Arthur says at last. He gives Eames that look that says this is an idea he’s prepared to fight for. “I found a place. Top floor, plenty of exits over the roof. There's a Saudi consul on the second level, so security's pretty tight. The costs are on me.”

Eames just says, “Paris?” like it’s somewhere north of Siberia not previously considered fit for habitation. 

“You can keep this place. Come back when you need to. It's three hours on the TGV." 

He picks up his glass and drinks from it, leans over his knees, waits patiently as if it’s only a matter of time before Eames sees the inevitability of his plan. He’s drinking the wine quickly, though. 

It's not going to work, Paris. Eames knows it's not going to work - too full of wankery, and too far from family. But it's a first step that brings Arthur closer to where Eames wants him, and for six months, maybe twelve, he can live with it. Just until his Dad's out again. He knows people who can hook him up with work. There's a mate of Miriam's who's a fancy modern art dealer - a bit of forgery and theft mixed up with a lot of mediocre originals sold on an extravagant commission that reflects how much slick talk it takes to sell that shit at twice the price of a luxury sports car. Eames has thought he could make a pretty good go of that. And he's been promising himself for almost a year now to give his body a break from flesh wounds and constant adrenalin. 

He thinks about a couple of bars he used to drink at, when family jobs took him up north, and makes Arthur wait.

“Can I sort out an inspection?” he says at last.

“Not possible,” Arthur informs him quickly. “It’s off the market.” 

For a second he thinks Arthur is fucking with him. Then he notices the hesitancy, the sense of something momentous slowly unfolding. 

“Someone took the lease, did they?” 

Arthur shakes his head, looking scowly and fierce like he does when something leaves him wrong-footed. “Paid a deposit. Just this afternoon. It’s a done deal.” 

And that’s – 

He reaches for Arthur’s hand, turns it over on his thigh so he can thumb at the tender inside of his wrist. “When you make reckless, out-of-character decisions, Arthur,” he says, low down, “it gives me the wildest urge to fuck you.”

Arthur ducks his head like he’s about to say it was only a deposit, a hundred thousand or so he could afford to lose. So Eames cuts him off.

“Yes,” he says. “I can work out of Paris.”

Maybe he could stick it for a year or two. See this thing with Arthur to its end. Find out what they've got left to keep them going once the ready fuel of lust and novelty is all burnt up. And he can't deny the appeal of having Arthur all to himself between jobs. No more gritting his teeth through late nights in the back garden at Pointe-Rouge when all he wants to do is throw Arthur over his shoulder and make for the bedroom. 

“What am I going to do with my boat?” his thoughts shift in alarm.

But his urgent train of thought gets derailed by Arthur climbing across his lap, steady on those wiry thighs so he can tug Eames’s bottom lip between his teeth and say, “Good choice." His hand closes on Eames's jaw, the heel of it jammed beneath the bone to tilt him into a kiss. "I didn’t have any counter-offers.”

**

Not much later, he’s got his forearm hooked under Arthur’s throat, holding him at an angle where he can slide into him, easy as a sigh. Underneath him, Arthur’s spine bends limberly away, and curves back again to where Eames can just reach to kiss the flexing muscle across his shoulders. 

“That’s it,” he murmurs, keeping his pace too slow to get them anywhere except sweatily stuck together. “That’s it.”

Repetition keeps him from voicing the other things he’s thinking – extravagant things that come from the heart, things he won’t be able to take back when the cold light of day makes them sound ridiculous.

He likes fucking when he’s in control of it. When Arthur’s in the mood to let him take control. He likes how it makes him generous, how he can read Arthur’s reactions and give him just what he needs to balance on the edge. He likes himself reflected in Arthur’s sighs, Arthur’s steady slide into jumbled profanities. 

“Jesus,” Arthur grinds out underneath him, arching his back to get the angle tighter. “Eames, you’re— fuck, fuck.”

There’s a bandanna holding the curtain back, right in his line of sight. It was red and black when he bought it in Mombasa, the first time around. It’s covered in dust now, half the colour bleached out by afternoon sunlight. 

“That’s it,” he murmurs into Arthur’s neck. 

They're going to do this in Paris, he thinks. In a new bed, in this new place that Arthur has recklessly bought. While he forges himself a new career as an art dealer. He can practically hear the doors opening, the opportunities breezing in.

They hit a sweet rhythm, breathing together in time with the leisurely curl of Eames's hips. His lungs feel endlessly capacious, athletic, immortal. When he remembers the tense heart-stutter that had plagued him last night, it's vanished.

He closes his eyes, dropping messy kisses over Arthur’s sweat-slickened skin. “That’s it. That's it.”

It's moments like these, slow-witted with contentment, physical urgency smothering his last flicker of intellect, that his doubts melt away like snowflakes. His body can sense something enduring between them, something wiry that winds through them both, too deep and tight for time to fray. And what his body believes, his mind, just now, is in no state to question. 

Arthur's hand settles over his on the mattress and clutches. He braces himself so that Eames can shove into him hard and true, jolting more of those fleeting, swiftly lost cries out of him. He's got steel in his bones, Arthur. Under the tailored surface, under his acrobatic intellect and all those hard-won defences, there's a weighty core to Arthur that none of life's assaults are ever going to change. The things he believes in, the things he holds dear. Moments like this, Eames thinks he could be one of those things, one day. 

His ribs give a twinge of pain at his reckless hitch of speed. Those wrecked abdominals from Kisumu that have never quite healed. He pauses for a moment, sheathed deep, to let the spasm pass. Arthur's head droops down between his shoulders the moment Eames removes his arm, like all the will to live has been fucked right out of him. 

The rib injury slowly unclenches. He likes the idea of it. A scar under the skin, a permanent change in the flesh. An anchor lodged forever in a moment in the past. 

"Eames," Arthur says, a naked word that asks for nothing.

He earns a deep, unguarded murmur as he eases out a little then slides back in, slow. Their bodies work beautifully together, more intuitive as the weeks go by. It's the sort of balanced engineering that has to have a claim on Arthur's heart. 

He gets a purposeful grip on Arthur's arousal and starts up his rhythm again, insistently building. The pitch of Arthur's responses rises from a growl, getting louder, getting helpless. He loves these moments, when Arthur curls in on himself, writhing under torture that only Eames can release him from; when he tenses every muscle as if about to leap into flight. 

"That's it." Eames kisses the back of his neck, his shoulder, eyes squeezed closed. "God you're lovely. That's it, darling."

Arthur comes, shuddering, like an intensely localised quake, and Eames thinks he can feel it transmitted right up through his ribs.

**

Not long afterwards, Arthur is clear-eyed and smiling again, lying back with a wrist wedged under the back of his neck. The sheets are draped loosely around them, liberated from the morning's crisp fold. Those black sheets, to go with the duvet cover in the green of the Kenyan flag that Charlie had bought him as a half-joking rebuke when he'd stayed away too long on that executive militarisation commission for Cobol. 

"I have to go out again," Arthur says with a glance at his watch. "Track down a pair of rollerblades."

There have been days when Eames would have resisted the thought of Arthur going back out into the city, covering up the nakedness that belongs to Eames alone. But today he has calls to make, doors to open, opportunities to court. 

"Mmmh."

Arthur's thigh is warm where his knee rests on it. Time could have stopped, suspending the afternoon until they're both ready to go on. A little later, Arthur rolls off the bed and onto his feet. He picks up his t-shirt from the doorway and shakes it out.

"I could have said no," Eames says, tethering him into hearing range. "What would you have done?"

Arthur looks at the t-shirt as if the answer might be there, then draws it over his head.

"Moved to Paris, I guess. And worn you down."

The humour in his eyes is warm. Intimate and lovely. Eames flicks his attention to the ceiling. 

"Look," Arthur resumes as he's crouching down to retrieve his socks. "It doesn't have to be a big deal." He pauses a moment before he rises. "Paris."

He's in t-shirt and underpants, tightly clutching a sock in each hand. He's got his stoic face on, like he's about to be the man the team needs to him be, whatever it takes. 

Eames sits up and hauls himself to the edge of the bed. 

"Come here."

The moment Arthur steps in reach, Eames runs the flat of his hand up the back of his thigh, over the firm curve of his arse, and up onto his waist. One of the socks falls unnoticed onto the floor.

He kisses Arthur's chest through the faded cotton, over his breastbone, and twice more, leaning to the right. 

"It's a big deal, okay. There's no point in doing it by halves."

Arthur's exhale has a bit of a snort in it, like Eames is only doing the unexpected to be contrary. But his voice is soft when he says, "All right, have it your way." 

With a stretch of his arm, he draws Arthur closer, so he can do what he's wanted to do for a long time and rest his forehead over the steady rise and fall of Arthur's ribs. He feels solid, like this. His heartbeat is lively. He smells real, with all the masking chemicals flushed off him by sweat and Eames's mouth. His fingertips stroke over the back of Eames's neck, holding him in place.

For a long while, he waits for the shift in the rhythm of Arthur's fingers that says his attention is losing its focus. With one last kiss, he leans back. Without thinking, he knows which call he's going to make first. All the steps after he's nailed that one are writing themselves like a script in his mind. 

"Go and run your errand," he says as Arthur is disappearing towards the bathroom. "I haven't had you on wheels yet."

"There are some serious mechanical issues there," comes Arthur's laughing voice through the door. "Starting with stability."

Eames stretches and walks over to the window, finding it hard to care whether the whole world sees him naked. 

"You'll work something out," he calls over his shoulder. "You always do."

The wrought iron balcony rails of the opposite apartment block look picturesque in the late afternoon sunlight, like a postcard ready to pocket and carry away. Behind him, the shower goes on with a clunk. That's how the present turns into the future, he thinks. Little moments like that.

He strips the bed down and pulls on some jeans to take the sheets to the basement laundry. Then he retrieves that ragged folding map of Paris from his Dad's old hardcover of Corot prints and lays it out on the kitchen table, because the next thing he's going to want is an address. 

**

 

The end

**Author's Note:**

> The title is bastardised from e.e. cummings' ["i like my body when it is with your (body)".](http://hellopoetry.com/poem/1590/i-like-my-body-when-it-is-with-your/)
> 
> This is the epilogue I've always meant to write to All the World is Bullet Shaped, because the main story ends in ambiguous optimism, then I posted that flash-back scene which ends on more of a sombre note, and it's my belief that any reader who has laboured through 70,000+ words deserves to be left in a good place. This is where the story was always going to end up in my mind, and at last I've got that idea onto the page.
> 
> I'm afraid it's awfully sentimental, more than I usually let myself write. I wanted to end on an unmistakably happy note this time, because for various RL reasons (including a long holiday with no computer access) it's time for me to turn my attention to all those neglected parts of my life that Inception has been such a wonderful distraction from.
> 
> Thanks especially to Donnie_Engelvin, whose encouragement and speculation helped turn this idea into an actual written reality.


End file.
